BloodyRabbit wrote: ↑4 years ago
Is someone still playing it? I'm enjoying running
Ranger-Captain of Eos right now.
Let me know if you guys are also meddling with the archetype!
Hi,
I'm still working on shadow, but I'm not sure if esper or mardu is the direction I'll be going in. I'm pretty convinced that between
path to exile and the new cards
Silent clearing and
ranger-captain of eos we want to be B/W/x. A few copies of
Unearth have really strong synergy with ranger captain as well and feel like a good addition.
Ironically I fell like the new horizon land is our biggest upgrade. Silent clearing has been amazing by giving us near perfect control over our life total as well as fixing a bunch of our mana problems. We can mitigate flooding by cycling the land later in the game and we can confidently run around 20 lands now to hit our first 3 land drops and have more keep-able opening hands. To me fixing these basic issues with the shadow archetype will fundamentally make us stronger and more consistent, even without a major power upgrade to other cards in the deck.
I agree with you that a 2 drop is something that the grixis lists have always been missing. I think JVP is fine up to 2 copies, but I'm not really down to play any more of any effect like that in a shadow deck. My gut says that
Dreadhorde Arcanist may be the best two drop, which is pulling me in the direction of mardu. It can play a similar value game that JVP offers with repeated flashbacks, but I feel like it brings a more aggressive slant to the deck and snowballs similarly to Dark Confidant if not removed immediately. It may be my bias, but I feel that the deck wants to be aggressive and not play especially long games, so JVP doesn't feel on strategy for my play-style. The only other red cards I'm running in the main-deck are 2 faithless looting and 1 copy of temur battle rage making it a very light splash.
It feels like there is a lot of unexplored space with the new B/W shadow builds and it may be a while until we discover all of the different ways to combine the new cards into a cohesive strategy. I'm still working on my mardu list, but I can post it here for discussion when I finish my first draft. Maybe change the title of the thread to B/W/x shadow so people can share different ideas here and we can see how lists are developing?